Hello and welcome to Teaching Python. This is episode 163, and today we're going to be talking
about finding time for your own learning. The voice that you're not so used to right now is mine.
I'm Sean Tiber. I'm a coder who teaches sometimes. And I'm Kelly Schuster-Paredes,
and I'm a teacher who codes sometimes. Not anymore. 


And I'm Julian Sequeira,
and I'm a... who CTOs. Ah, that was good. You did find a C word.
That's a good job. You know, just rolling around Eastern Australia, CTOing my way through life.
That's right. That's it. Just by the beach.


Navigating the animals. Yeah. So we have to say the fact that I did bribe Sean with a good time of
laughter with you, Julian. So make sure you don't, you know.
I'm all out of dad jokes. I'm sure it'll be fine. I needed it. It's been the longest week ever, and
it's only Tuesday, so I'm looking forward to this. Excellent. Okay, can I give you a dad joke
quickly? Yes. Okay, please. Why did the piece of paper go to the gym? Why did the piece of paper go
to the gym? Don't Google it. I'm not. To get ripped. Oh,
nice one, Dad. Thanks. Oh, my God. There you go.
And that's how we lost the rest of our followers.
And that was the end of the podcast.
Alright. How do you want to do this kill? Yeah, Sean's going to announce the whole episode. I'm
going to sit here and be quiet for once. I'm not going to flub it up. We're going to announce it,
and then we're going to do Wednesday night. I made a little bit out of practice, but I think I can
pull this off. Let me just stretch a little bit. It's important to stay hydrated, kids, before you
do something like this. How are you hydrating, Sean? I am hydrating with a very nice brown liquid in a glass. It's Coca-Cola. Yes. Coffee. So why don't we start where we always do.


That's my favorite part of kicking off the podcast is the wins of the week. And I'm going to make
Kelly go first because she was the one who wrote me into this. Nice. I'm so excited because you
know what? Today, finally, after, I don't know, were you around when we had the robot dog?
No, you came after the robot dog. I think so. We had videos of robot dogs when I was there.
So I have successfully and I had. implemented it with the sim this is like a simulator and it has
all this code and I did this as a ones of a week kind of I don't know last year or something I got
the simulator running which was kind of cool but today I actually let go of the reins and let
Claude code make my virtual environment push it up to github I was actually really scared I was
like oh my god I'm gonna get like cyber security vetted by our IT department but then I also wrote
um the documentation for it and um made an html code for my our canvas lms page and it's finally
done this has been like my dashboard project that i never got finished i finally did the robot
thing i posted it i sent it to the kid who's been playing with it uh for a while and i was like by
the way this is what i've been telling you that i was telling you that you're going to learn And so
now he can follow the code. He can go to my GitHub page. He can pull down the code. He can run the
simulator. And you can play around with it. So I feel like, ah,
check that off the long list of to-dos. Nice. Very nice. Very cool. Accomplished.
Yeah, and it lines with what we're talking about today. So I pick, I pick, I pick Julian.
Oh, okay. Okay. All right. So I'll keep it relatively quick. I got a couple of wins.
But one, I went to an amazing party on the weekend with some guys that I used to be their customer
when I was doing PyBytes. And they were a company we used to use. And I've just become really good
friends with them over the years. So we had this incredible time at the party. And just as it goes,
I just networked with so many... cool people there was an author i was chatting with um people who
run some guy runs a medical company in a startup space and all these cool different things so it
was a really uh energizing saturday and it was really cool so that was good um but the one thing i
do want to give a quick shout out we had uh after the last episode where i said i was going down to
tasmania um a fellow aussie from down in tassie uh reached out and said,
have a great time. So a shout out to Doug. He's actually American, but he lives in Tasmania.
He knows where Tasmania is. Well, he lives there now. That's great. And so that was a really cool
connection. And so I've got to read. He sent me another message with the story of how that
happened. But yeah, very cool. Very cool this stuff's happening. Isn't that the best kind of
networking where it doesn't feel like you're networking? It's not work. It's just you're meeting
cool people and being genuinely curious about them. Just enjoy the conversations.
If it's not work, is it just netting?
Maybe. Maybe.
Solid dad joke. Solid dad joke. I've been hanging out with you guys way too long.
Yep. Fair. All right, Sean. Quick, quick recover. Recover.
so work is work you know strikes and gutters it's uh it's good it's bad it's everything in between
um but the the part that meant a lot to me that was kind of cool was i had a moment where i worked
on a project a couple of weeks ago that reminded me of all the little things like i used to build
it when i was teaching all these little like tools and apps and stuff that you didn't go very far
but um i learned a ton from and i did this one mostly by vibe coding but um It was kind of a cool
idea, and I was impressed with how fast it went. I set up a GitHub Pages app,
and Kelly, I shared this one with you. um because what i was trying to do was figure out how to get
my son to take better notes in his planner because like the trend is oh i'm doing this all on my
screen or i'm looking i'm reviewing everything digitally and i i know it's there because it's all
in the lms right and then and then but how did you forget about like these 17 different assignments
and things that you had to do well oh i'm sorry i forgot right so I was going back and channeling
my inner Kelly who's like, write it down. It connects. It helps people process it.
There's studies for it. And so what I did was I need a way to do this that kind of also scratches
my itch because I'm not the kind of person who likes to lay everything out on the page. So I built
a GitHub Pages app that's a static page. It has a single AWS Lambda function behind it that all it
does is take a URL from a Blackbaud site that you have of your kid's calendar.
So it's like an iCal file that's behind an obfuscated URL for security. I hate that word,
obfuscated. Go ahead. It's the best word. You should really get behind it.
But you take and copy and paste the iCal link from BlackBot into it that has your kid's schedule.
And it goes through and it builds an entire PDF planner for them that's like six pages long,
like one page for every day. It has a cover page to it so they can put important things for the
week there. And then each day they just go through and kind of quickly jot down, here's what I have
for homework. Here's when it's due. Here's things I need to remember. And it has little hints in
there about like... hacks for the day. And it has a little like place where they can write down,
these are the three most important things I have to do today. So they start to think about what is
important versus what's noise and clutter. And it turned out awesome. Like it's really great.
And I did a whole thing with like the security of it where you can see all the source code online.
It's a public repo. So you can see all everything that's there, but we don't log the schedule.
We don't log the link. None of that gets logged out. So for your own child's privacy, you don't,
we don't log any of that. It's like purely open to you to use. Right. And I loved it.
And no one, none of the kids used it. It was like, thanks dad.
I think.
So, so version two. I was waiting for that. I was like. No kid's printing that out.
Isn't that called a weekly planner? Yeah, it's just a weekly planner, but it's got your schedule in
it, the whole thing. I try to make all the boring parts easy, everything. So version two made it so
that you could choose a theme to it, so you could have Gen Z slang to it, you can have gamer slang
to it, and it recodes the whole thing with different slang. It lasted a week this time instead of
immediately rejected, so I feel like I made some progress. I hope you didn't put, what is it?
Have you heard that slang? Not yet. It has not made the journey home. Apparently that's a high
school slang that I learned when I was watching a video with my middle schooler. We were like,
what is that? And then we, of course, asked my high schooler. He's like, yeah, that's me. I'm
saying it wrong. It's like that bleep is awesome. Whoa.
That has not made it across you, thank goodness. I feel very old right now and out of touch.
Wait, you'll have a high schooler next year. Yeah, this is true. So that was my win.
It was more about the fact that it was just one of those little projects that I love making and the
challenges figuring out how to do it. in economically right so there's not a lot of code behind it
it's really lightweight and i would also try to make it very privacy aware and security aware and
that was a lot of fun to do also so it was like vibe code vibe coding but with some like good
intentions behind it nice man that's cool it is sad it is i was really enjoying that story until
the end i thought oh man i wonder if i could use this for my 14 year old this would be great Tests
were less than conclusive. Market research was... Great idea,
poor execution.
So why don't we jump into it? So I suggested this topic because I had a friend of mine the other
day kind of marvel, like, Sean, you like... you keep up with all the things that are happening in
technology? And you're always like, you know, able to talk about all these things and it's really
detailed and it's really complex. And how do you find time to learn all those things? And I had to
stop and think about it because don't really feel like I have the time to sit down and just learn
stuff, right? Like there's no time for that. I also realized I think it's kind of woven into the
way that I work, the way I behave, the way I operate. But I wanted to have the conversation with
both of you and say, well, how do you find time to learn new things? Because the pace of change is
crazy. And it's one of those things where I think we're in a point in time in society where
anything's plausible. I remember a comedian talking about this a few days ago where you can just
make something up. Have you heard about the gobbity-gah model from open face hugging thing?
And you have to just nod along and be like, oh, yeah, totally. I read about that on Hacker News
last week, right? Things move so quickly. Who knows what's real and what's new and what's valuable?
I was trying not to say a joke, so go ahead, Jillian. I was going to say, when people asked me the
same question, I was like, I have no friends. My computer's my friend. Seriously,
I was saying the same thing. It's like, how do we find time for our own learning? I literally,
all I do is read. Newsletters, updates, play with the AI.
I type into my AI or one of my many AIs when I'm in a meeting with somebody,
taking notes so that when I don't know what they're talking about, afterwards I have this whole
ability to read, especially when I'm doing financial. when we're working with the finances at the
school, I'm like, I have no idea what they're talking about with me. So the secret is being
antisocial. Well, that was the podcast, everyone. Antisocial, that's it. Thank you, everyone. It
was really great to talk about this. Cool. Yeah, I'm glad we got that done. Well, you know, I
haven't seen Sean in ages, so that's probably, no, I'm just kidding. But yeah, I think you
literally have to schedule it. You have to schedule, for me, I have to actually schedule off time
versus learning time. And that's why I think we should change the title of this podcast.
Let's just start again. Okay, go ahead. I was kidding. No, but Julian, how about you? I think where
you're going to is that it takes some sacrifice. I think that's where I put it. Because with three
kids, it is difficult to find that time. And so I have to do it after they go to bed.
I certainly can't do it while they're awake after school and they're, you know, just doing all the
parenting stuff. So once they're in bed, you know, I have, you know, you build the habits in,
you build the routine, all those typical kinds of productivity techniques, right? So the second my
youngest is in bed, I pick up the guitar and that's where I do my guitar practice for the day. But
once all three are in bed, then I get some deep work in with, you know, technology and whatever
else.
And that's at the expense, at the sacrifice of hopping on Discord and playing Helldivers 2 or
whatever other video game with my friends. Or that's sometimes at the expense of sitting with my
wife and watching a TV show, right? But... your point then you get asked the question how do you
know all this stuff how are you keeping on top of all this it's because i make the dedicated time
to sit there and play and read some articles or you know text with people like you guys who you
know will say hey did you see this did you read this have you checked this out you know and there's
a lot there's a lot of different things that you sprinkle in throughout the day where you make
these conscious notes like you were saying kelly you'll pick up your phone during a meeting or
something and quickly type into Claude or whatever, what does this mean? Or remind me about this
later, you know? And I do that often as well. I think that's a tip everyone should be conscious of
is they have this little genius in their pocket that if you're in any conversation at any point,
if you see something, hear a word, something doesn't make sense, or you're curious about it,
quickly type it in and then check it later. Yeah, I actually have projects. or um you know projects
in claude or i have what are they called in chat gpt projects i think as well um where say um let's
say teaching python let's not even let's just vibe coding say i'm talking about vibe coding and i'm
having a conversation with somebody about vibe coding i can open up that project type in a new chat
and as we're talking i you know like maybe somebody says oh yeah obfuscation i hate that word you
are obfuscation and you have to check for the app that you vibe coded i'm like oh what is that word
obf and i try to sound it out and i put it in there and i was like what does that mean when your
app and you have to check for security so i literally am typing my question as we're talking or
listening to a meeting and then like the entire meeting i don't take word for word notes i just say
something like fill in the blank we were talking about privacy and you know let's say app
authentication and security keys what's the best protocol um i didn't really know off the top of my
head blah blah they said this verbal like conversation and then i return it make these into notes
that i can review later and then i actually take those notes and try to verify them all with
whatever whatever url or web page that i can and that's how i take my my learning from those
meetings it's surprisingly very very efficient but so it's crazy but i don't know you have to
document it for us i do second second way that i actually i really do um schedule time so luckily
and unluckily my youngest is a major soccer uh player and he practices Monday,
Wednesday, Friday, and has games Saturdays and Sundays. So that is at least eight hours a week.
And I, you know, did against what I said I would never do.
I bought Starlink.
And for 80 bucks a month, I can tell you that I run five chatbots,
VS Code, and like 20 tabs open. from starlink and i never like wait for anything to return it is
just like sitting on the hood of your car while you're at soccer it's stuck in the in the sunroof
i'm probably dying from all the radiation waves and and elon knows everything that i'm doing and
has totally tracked it because i'm very interesting person you know yeah well of course and so but
i i think it's like one of the the best savers because i for the longest time i was trying to use
my cellular wi-fi hotspot and i don't know if you've tried to run hotspot and then do anything
that is ai it's just like painful you're switching like 12 different times just to wait for that
response to happen so i i did what third world country do you live in The United States of America.
West Boca. West Boca. I don't know. West Boca is covered by like trees and has no cellular service
for me. It's like a middle of the swamp. Have you been out there, Sean? Oh,
yeah. I don't know why. No cellular service, really. One bar. It's flat.
It's not like there's hills to block the signal. I don't get it. This is the mosquitoes. Yeah,
exactly. Exactly.
Ruthless scheduling. Right. And taking advantage of downtime. We've got after the kids go to bed.
So sacrificing other things for it. And, you know, I was I was thinking about this. I don't think
I'm as scheduled as Kelly is. Right. I do think I lean more towards, you know,
the making choices about how I spend my time. Right. And the number of times people are like, have
you seen this show? And I'm like, no. right and and so the choice between sitting down and watching
tv and like just kind of vegging out is appealing sometimes but if if i have a choice of how i want
to spend my time it's doing something that's more interactive right so it usually gravitates
between yes some video gaming or it is i'm actively trying to solve a problem or figure something
out and i'm kind of baking the learning into the problem i'm trying to solve as well which is not
really I guess the best way for someone who does that is a day job to spend their off time too.
But that's what I like doing. And it gives me the chance to have, I think,
more control over what I'm trying to solve or what I'm trying to learn. And it's more enjoyable in
some ways than what work feels like. There's that passion side of it too,
right? I mean, you have this intrinsic desire to know these things. You get enjoyment out of it.
allows the practice of saying no to other things to actually feel pretty good yeah right now i'm
the same way because and i was i was going to say this i'm really glad you said it um the whole not
to get too philosophical with society and everything but everything's very consumptive right it's
all about keeping us focused on a screen consuming content whether it be tick tock youtube uh
netflix whatever it doesn't matter right but I think if people actually challenged themselves and
said, well, how much of my day am I spending consuming that kind of entertainment versus anything
educational or that might further their career or whatever, it would be a bit of a shock,
right? And then you'd say, oh, yeah, okay. Well, if I did spend two hours on screens today doing
YouTube and whatever else. I could have at least spent half an hour reading this book. Yeah.
Practicing. Not all screen time is created equal, right? No. But it's funny because I tell the
kids, if you're not creating, you're consuming. And we don't consume here. I think that's been a
motto growing up. They're like, no, I'm learning how, my oldest, I'm learning how to tie a fish
knot. Okay, continue. Yeah. Now practice the fish knot. He does. Show me that you can do it.
That was a lot during COVID. And then meanwhile, he walks up, mommy, I used the drill and the saw
to make a sword. I'm like, great. Good job, YouTube.
But I think like, again, I always. push it back to that type of person,
you know, that type of person that likes to solve problems. I, I do occasionally watch TV and then
I have a feeling of guilt because of that, because I'm not really actively doing something.
And I think I almost get like this sort, this like sense of depression because I feel like, Oh,
I could have done this. And I've gotten better endorphins when I'm actually doing than just sitting
here consuming. consuming a TV show. So my TV shows have turned into more like documentaries and
history kind of things just because at least I feel like I'm learning. But I think that's part of
who we are sometimes and our personalities for coding and for solving problems.
So one of the interesting things from an earlier part of my career was that I ran marketing for a
school of nursing, right? and it was an online university and it was for nurses who had like the
first two-year degree in nursing but wanted to get a four-year degree either because they needed
it for their license or for a promotion at work or for something like that and it was really
fascinating because I had the best students in the entire university. right like nurses are already
pretty hard working right like they they are disciplined they're focused if they're not they don't
make it through nursing school and they don't last very long as nurses so the students that we
would bring in were phenomenal because the the thing that i realized or came to realize about them
was that all of them were doing it for a reason right this was a choice no one told them they had
to go to school right like our our you know child learners have to learn,
right? Like they're legally required to be in school, right? They have to learn something and they
don't really have a lot of agency over what they get to learn most of the time, right? Like Kelly
creates that dynamic in her classroom about giving students agency and choice and they get to
choose what they learn and how they learn. But even with that, like there's still a curriculum that
we have to structure around the course, right? So it's still guided and it's still limited.
What I find fascinating is as adults, we all have the ability to learn anything we want.
Right. Like you can learn literally anything that you find fascinating or interesting or useful or
whatever. And you also have the choice to say, no, I'm not going to learn about that. Like, that's
not interesting to me. And I was thinking about it like, you know, for us,
I think we spend a lot of our. personality drives us towards spending time on things we find
interesting and engaging and we get excited about learning there's like that endorphin rush that we
get of of learning something new that's interesting but like i don't know half the trees and plants
that are in my backyard right i don't it doesn't interest me right like it's the big green one and
it's this the short stubby one like those that's what I that's the level of care that I have about
you know botany but there are other people out there who can tell you like the entire life cycle of
every single plant in their yard and what fertilizer they take and how often to water them and
everything and you know my contribution to botany around our house was I did an automatic water
timer for our hanging plants last week right like I don't know how much water they're supposed to
get but they're going to get 45 seconds of it every day whether they like it or not at 9 30 in the
morning because that's the stuff I find interesting right and and that I think also drives a lot of
the learning it's not just the the quantity of learning that we do it's also the shape and the
direction that it takes as adults And we don't really get that as kids that often. And sometimes I
wonder what we're missing out because we have so much choice and freedom that we don't often get
forced to learn something new and different that might expand our thinking and our capabilities in
a new direction that was unexpected and different. There's your new app.
So what do you like? I like computers and technology. You're going to learn about botany. Exactly.
Let's go. It works by design.
You know, I started thinking while you were talking, I was thinking like at work,
you know, we have professional development and I'm thinking about the people that have been coming
faithfully to all my trainings. I do these trainings every week, usually six,
six a quarter. And I've had people that have come for the last year and a quarter, every single
session. They really want to be there and they really want to learn.
Our school made space for that and made food for them and gave them this opportunity where
someone's going to give them a learning 30 minutes and then they can go play and do other things.
I think when... were talking about that scheduling. Like, those people are busy as well.
Our teachers are busy. And the fact that they come in during their lunch, eat lunch while they've
got their computer for 30 minutes, rushing to get in in between, you know, whatever lunch break
they had.
It is agency, but at the same time, it could be guided agency,
right? So you could almost, it's like Duolingo. Maybe you do that 30 minutes a day of Duolingo of
something that you didn't. know about so that you can do something different than what you normally
typically do right yeah like that's your app sean make it i mean that's it's a it's a pretty good
idea like that curated learning right and things that are intentionally designed to push you in
different directions like you know i know for me especially right now the way that i get exercise
is i go to a gym at 530 in the morning and they will work me out for an hour with a coach who tells
me exactly what to do, how to do it. If I don't do it that way, she comes and yells at me nicely,
but she still yells at me like, what are you doing? Right. I would never do those things for
myself. Right. Like I would never go to the gym and I certainly wouldn't be as disciplined and
focused in the gym. And I certainly wouldn't be as creative as the, as the exercises are that she
comes up with. Right. So I'm intentionally kind of outsourcing that broadening of my health. to
someone else right and i wonder if it's like do we need gym classes for our minds do we need school
for our minds that like it's not necessarily a class i don't want to sign up for an accounting
class right but i wouldn't mind going to a class where they're like today's subject is accounting
and i'm going to teach you some really interesting things about accounting that you probably didn't
know that might be relevant to other parts of your life and you should think about so this is this
is interesting to me because i see I see what you're both saying. My challenge,
I think, that I see with people is that we've kind of covered people who have that intrinsic nature
about them, right? So that's fine. But the people who don't, and there's many people like that,
right? They have their interests, as you said, Sean, you know, they might be the perfect botanist,
right? But for whatever reason, they might have to learn something like technology, right? Let's
say they're starting a business and then, oh, wow, there's a whole tech stack I have to worry
about. I've got to worry about my website, all these different things. So things people need to
learn and almost everyone now is being told they need to learn something about AI, right?
We were at dinner last night with this lovely family and the mom, she's a florist.
And she was asking, I don't know how you know this stuff, how you do these things, similar to that
conversation you had, Sean. But I said to her, I don't know how you florist. There's no verb for
that.
She also CTOs on the site. She dabbled in CTOing.
And the thing is that when you have people who aren't intrinsically...
into that education space or don't get that dopamine hit and those endorphins from learning
something new but then they have to and they're thrust into a situation where they have to um what
would you recommend for them what do you i mean i look kind of like the solution you're talking
about where there's like a coach to whip you right i think part of it is what does it feel like
right it's not even so much what is it like i mean you know what like the best way for you to feel
that and i i would come join you except for you're literally on the other side of the planet go ask
her to teach you how to florist for an hour and struggle with being a florist right where it's
completely out of your element and then i think it might be easier to answer that question of how
do you learn ai as a florist well as a technologist how do you learn how to arrange flowers right
and what does that feel like and i think that was one of the things that kelly like our best year
of teaching code was the first year because we were struggling our way through the learning and we
felt it with the students as we went, right? And as the years progressed and as we got better at
teaching it, we became more distanced from the emotional state of learning something that's hard
and unfamiliar and new. And I think it became harder to connect and relate with the students as we
got, the further and further we got into it. So, I mean... Julian, I think I'm going to have to go
find a florist or something and say, teach me how to, or a botanist, teach me about all the plants
in my yard. I'm going to take notes and I'm going to struggle with it. And it's not going to be as
interesting and easy because I lacked the context in the background that makes it easy to learn it.
I'm going to throw a whole branch into this whole pile.
We also could be defining the fact that what we see as learning and someone else not learning could
be a totally different thing. Like my mom, for example, I went and saw her last, you know,
my mom and dad, I went and saw them last weekend and I gave her two books. And I was like, man,
this is a good book, mom. It's like, you know, it was pretty thick for me. It was fiction. I don't
read fiction very fast. I can devour website on end and read chat GPT notes,
you know, endlessly of my meetings. But give me a fiction book and I struggle to get through. I was
like, here, you know, I read this one. By the way, it's called Pachinko. And then I read...
What's it called? Theo. Theo of Golden. Two books I gave my mom. Pretty good. But it took me
forever to get into them. Gave my mom. She's like, do you want... And like two days later, she's
like, do you want your books back? I'm like, what the heck? She's like, I finished them already.
I'm like, mom, it took me three months, three months to finish those books. She's like, oh, you
know, I just couldn't, you know, it's very easy to read. So in her sense, she was, you know, doing,
she's done her learning that way. And for her, that was her enjoyment of trying to get through a
story and learn, because the book of Pachinko is all about. the koreans during japan's overtake of
korea and so for me i was like googling stuff i'm like oh when did that happen what year but she
knew it already because that was part of her learning and history so i wonder i wonder you know
people constantly are still learning but sometimes that learning seems like something they enjoy
doing kind of like you know sean building an app to water his plants you're learning but it's
something you enjoy right and but the the growth is minimal right like it wasn't really that hard
it was like i had to do some amazon shopping and figure out like tubing and things like that but
the actual scheduling of the the timer wasn't that hard right and What you're saying makes me think
of, you know, what makes a better student? Is it the kid who can learn everything easily,
right? And everything comes without a lot of effort. Or is it the kid who is like slogging through
and building the muscles of like, of how to learn and how to figure,
how to become successful being a student? Which one makes the better student? The one for whom it
comes easy? Or the one who has to build all the muscles to get there? Well, it's like
weightlifting, right? You're not going to sit there and lift 10 pounds 40 times. Well, sometimes.
You're going to get a different type of workout, though. Right. You're going to get a toning
workout versus if you do a heavier weight, then you're going to get a growth workout. So maybe
you're maintaining and toning and fine-tuning that expertise. Where when you're doing like a
heavier weight, you're like doing some heavy lifting on that muscle. Oh, totally metaphorically.
And I'm not an exercise physiologist, but you can't do either one all the time,
right? If all you do is lift light weights all the time and you're not really straining yourself,
you're never going to really grow, right? And never really going to get further. And also on the
other side, if you're always... Maxing out and trying to lift as much weight as possible. You could
actually hurt yourself pretty badly, right? It's the it's the mix of the two that makes things
interesting and where you see the most development So I think some of that goes with learning as
well. You can't always feel like it's you know, like it's painful and onerous and heavy all the
time. And you also can't go without challenging yourself. So Kelly, it reminds me, it's the
Goldilocks zone, right? We came full circle back to that of like that desirable difficulty for
learning things and adjusting that on the fly. Yeah. You both missed option three,
which is get someone else to lift the weights for you. And then, which is where a lot of people are
going these days. Well, it's like, what is that? I think it was, was it Simon Willison who quoted,
it was an article, somebody, one of those people, this is a problem when you consume too much
information, you can't stick it all in. But they were talking about when you move something heavy
from one side of the room to the other side, and then you move it back to the side that you
started, that's work. However, if you pick up weights and you walk them in a farmer's carry back
and forth, that's a workout.
And so, like, do you want to have a workout and do your brain?
Sorry, strengthen your brain. Sorry. Do your brain some beneficial workout is what I was saying.
Yeah. I don't know. No, that's cool. I like that one. I have a question. What do you guys like
better? Do you like reading, watching YouTube, podcasts, talking about things?
What's your favorite way of learning? I know Sean's. Just break it. Go on,
Sean. No. These days, I like a combination of reading and a lot of interactive stuff with Claude on
voice mode. So like that time when I, after I dropped my kids off for school in the morning and
when I have that like 15 minute drive home, um, before the first meeting starts, that's like my
golden time. Right. So that's where I'm like, all the things that are on my mind, either I'm just.
brain dumping them out to get them organized for later or i'm like hey i want to know about this
thing can you explain it to me can you give me sources like and i challenge it like i don't think
that's quite right like can you go deeper on that um so i'm i'm kind of like you kelly i'm trying
to find learning opportunities where they where they're available right in the day um and
especially with as much travel as i'm doing i do that a lot either on airplanes or in airports or
when i'm like at the hotel room like i've got downtime and the last thing i want to do is spend
that like watching tv because i feel extra guilty for being away from home and not being with my
family so if i'm going to have the downtime i should use it productively so at least they know i'm
i'm using it well julian i think i like um look for me it's always about building and that that
comes from the pie bite stuff right is that i i like to learn by building and i don't know it it's
that just-in-time model where it's like i don't kind of want to learn about say every single
thing on this topic i just want to learn what i need to learn to get the project done yeah right so
it's very targeted learning and for that i'll happily read something i'll you know use ai to help
me decipher something i'll watch a youtube video whatever but i will stop myself as soon as i get
the information i need to finish building whatever so the learning comes from the building and
creating things so i'm doing lots of little projects here and there that are interest projects for
me that also happen to apply to the things I'm doing day to day with work and it just it works
really well but to your point Sean I really like bouncing ideas off of AI because it will challenge
me and you know you set up the whole what do they call them like gems in Gemini and all that stuff
you set them to challenge you right so i do like to throw in things there and have it challenge me
back and be like well did you consider this did you consider this what about this bias this
technology whatever um so that that's pretty much it's it's kind of just very scattered but based
on what i need in the moment yeah so the other thing that you should also do and i i someone
pointed this out to me it might have even been you kelly that you should ask your your favorite ai
chat bot what it knows about you. And you can ask it what it knows about the way you like to learn
and the types of questions you ask. And it's fascinating what it repeats back to you and how it
describes things. Like it tells me that I want a system for everything, right? Like I want,
I want a system for learning. I want a system for organizing things. I want things well documented.
And I thought that was really interesting because I wouldn't describe myself that way. Right. But
what it pointed it out to me, I was like, yeah, you know, it's right because I know that I don't
necessarily discipline or focus my efforts in a very disciplined way. So I want systems and
structures that help encourage me to do that. Right. So maybe I approach the learning the same way,
and I think it's probably the next conversation I'm going to have after school drop-off tomorrow
morning. It's like, what do you know about the way I like to learn? I'm doing that right now, but
for some reason I'm not going fast there. It's coming around slow today.
Not on Starlink. Yeah, reboot the Starlink. You know, it's funny because I feel like I learn more
from talking to people.
join so many pod like not podcasts but like webinars and I never finish them all but I like speed
watching them I join them all so I can watch them fast the cyber security ones I sometimes like
stop rewind and listen over and over again to get all the words but I like having somebody talk to
me and then give me these words that I like need to make connections with and then go search it up
i feel like sometimes i need a direction um of learning because i feel especially now with ai i was
never like this before ai but i feel more so within ai i just am like this squirrel you know oh
agents oh no there's cloud oh we got a new model oh and i can't keep focused so i find that if i
listen to a webinar or i talk to somebody um and multitask during that I get further.
Are you trying to type your chat? I hear you clanking. That's not me. I know it's Sean.
I know his typing.
You know the keyboard sound. But you know what? This is why I think for years now, years and years
through my coaching, through everything and any of my clients listening to this or ex-clients,
they will know the one thing I always waffle on about is to build your network. is to build do some
netting do some netting netting for kelly's new coin term but because you just never know which
conversation is going to inspire you or give you that educational hit so like i mentioned before in
my evenings after the kids go to bed i might hop on discord right and play some video games but the
thing i didn't mention is those guys they're all technologists they're all in technology they're
from aws from cloudflare from all these large companies and they all have incredible technical
skills and you know last night one of them was talking about the amount of cvs that are being fixed
in linux today in the patch uh patch cycle that's going through this month and that's a really cool
conversation to have right and that that keeps me fresh on these different things that i may not be
paying attention to myself likewise the conversation on the weekend you know i had a chat with
someone who was in a different um space with ai than me and was talking about um all these other
different things and you know different places to contract and all this kind of stuff so it's um i
think if you make the time as well just to connect with people build that network and just chat
with interesting people you just never know what can come from that. And then the education gets
worse because you have to learn something new from there. So perpetuating cycle.
I do like that, Kelly, though, because I think, you know, as amazing as the... LOMs are and what
they can do and how useful and helpful they are and complimentary about my sharp thinking and
strategy, right? You haven't trained enough. Mine hates me.
I mean, I try, but I guess I'm just too likable for models, right?
But there's something about the human element and there's something about the authenticity and...
desire to learn things, especially around, you know, people who, who share that love of learning
and that desire to learn that you just, I don't know how they're going to find a way to emulate
that, right? Like that's not something that feels reproducible at this point. And it's something
that I think as humans, we've evolved to discern, right? You can kind of tell when someone's full
of shit. right? Like a model, right? They don't really know what they're talking about, but people
who are genuinely engaged and learning things and excited about it and want to tell you about it.
Like, first of all, that's a special kind of nerd. And second of all, those are also my favorite
kind of people, right? Like those are like, that's like what PyCon is like going around and just
talking to people who are excited about what they're learning and what they're doing. And you get
to have all these amazing conversations with really interesting. deep people, right? And I think
that, to your point, Kelly, sparks a lot of that further enjoyment of learning,
because I know that even talking to an AI is very internal,
right? It just loops back on me and it reflects back on me to the next thing I want to learn. But
somehow talking with another human who really enjoys learning opens me up to all these other
things. It doesn't become that closed loop. It becomes more of an open process.
But you have to listen to my British guy on chat to be to talk to me in the morning.
Sounds very posh.
I mean, that's that's the other one that I'm curious about. Like, forget the different models. I
want to talk to your version of my of Claude. Yes. And how is it different than my Claude?
Mine is always a contrary. And he's like, hmm, I see that. I hear that you're meddling around with
it. Do you want me to tell you why it's wrong?
It seems very personal. I want to talk to your agent. It goes back to that.
I keep seeing this one thing on... I'm sorry, I'm digressing because we're getting towards the end.
But have you seen the short little clip where the robots are going around in like a Family Guy
cartoon and they're with... and they're like pew pew pew pew and they're walking around and then
all of a sudden they go into the house and the one robot grabs the other gun he goes no not them
and they're like but why we kill all humans he's like no they always said please and thank you and
so i'm always like thank you very much that was awesome thank you thanks for telling me i'm dumb
But anyways, last tips on finding time that doesn't take away from your family,
your hobbies, your sanity, your friends, your life, your fitness.
I don't know if I'm just getting older, but I always used to think about what my college swim coach
used to say when I told him I needed to mispractice for a test or a project or whatever. And he'd
look at me and say, Sean, life is about choices. Right? It's the choices that you make,
and the consequences or the outcomes of those choices are what you have to live with,
right? And everything in our life is a choice, right? I'm going to choose how I'm going to spend my
time, of which it's finite. There's only so much time I'm ever going to have. And,
you know, maybe as I'm getting older and hopefully a little bit wiser, I keep choosing the things
that make the most of the time that I have and are productive. you know,
keep me balanced as a human being and as a dad and as a husband and father and all of those things.
And as a co-worker, how do I balance all those things that help keep me happy?
And one of those things has always been learning. But now the really tricky part is sometimes what
do I have to give up in order to learn, right? And how do I also... you know use the time that i
have that i would otherwise be wasting on waiting for something or unproductive time or whatever i
think that's kind of the amazing thing about about the time we live in if i wanted to learn
something while i'm waiting at the dmv 20 years ago i'd have to bring along a book right or my
homework or schoolwork or whatever and now it's like i just pull out the little magic slab of sand
and electricity from my pocket and i start like learning something there. Right. And,
and I even have the magic wire things that go in my ears that I, I can listen to it without anyone
else hearing it. Right. Like what an amazing time to be a learner that all of this is at our
fingertips and we can take it with us pretty much anywhere we want. Like why wouldn't I choose to
learn? Yeah. That's great. You want to follow that up? Yeah. Yeah.
Okay.
I'll follow it up. I think. The last tip I will give, or the last thing I'll say on this is,
as Sean was saying, it's choices. People talk about time management. I would say it's priority
management, right? But to that point, you have to prioritize relaxation and you have to prioritize
learning. what i do like about this age is that we can learn anywhere but that can also lead to
burnout right and and just feeling overwhelmed like i haven't relaxed in three weeks you know so
what i would say to anyone listening is build the habit build the routine so like i said for me
it's around 7 30 when my youngest goes to bed that's when my guitar non-negotiable every day and
tech learning after that at nine o'clock right But put a boundary around it.
Okay, if I'm starting at 9, I'm done by 10. And then it's bed. Then it's a half-hour TV show.
It's reading a book. It's whatever I want to do. And then that's guilt-free. I think a lot of
people have guilt for not doing it, as you were saying before, Kel. There's an anxiety to consuming
instead of being productive. So I think there needs to be a balance. I think people need to feel
less guilty about taking time for themselves. But then you can't swing too much either way,
right? There's a centrist model here of being balanced on both sides. So that's what I would say.
Find that balance, even if it is half an hour of each. It's better than nothing. And then the last
part on that, just a little bit more on that. Yeah, keep going, keep going. And then when you screw
that up, don't get mad at yourself. Don't feel extra guilty. Like,
just accept it and go with it, right? Like, it happened. be a goldfish, move on,
like start again the next day, right? Let it go. And that is, I think the other thing that's hard
to do now too, is we put so much pressure on ourselves to strive for perfection that we forget that
it's about the striving that matters, not the reaching the goal. Yeah. Yeah. Well, real quick,
I wrote a post last week. I saw this guy was explaining, it's like a triangle. You can be well
-rested and fit. You can be fit and successful. You can be successful and well-rested,
but you can't be all three. I've made my choices, Kelly.
No, but after retrospect, what is your measure of success for that day?
Your success can change daily, and what you feel is successful,
even in hourly. Mine, for example, success is waking up after a five-hour.
and not feeling completely exhausted and maybe or my success is getting to the gym four out of the
five days that I go to the gym like so your success can actually be mutable and that triangle
doesn't have to be what is it an isosceles It's like perfect. It can be like an acute or
equilateral. Thank you. Equilateral. It can be. See, that's why I'm not learning about math.
But you can change it and make it an acute triangle if you want to and just change it. You could
essentially have all three. It just doesn't have to be equally parted. Yeah. Make it a hexagon.
Make an exit cut and add some more stuff in it. All right.
Well, this is going to be fun editing because for me, that's 51 minutes because now I do the
editing with AI's help. So now someone's concerned about time when she has to do the editing. It's
fine. Did you know ChachiBT now can edit podcasts really well? What? Now you tell me.
Just started. So if anyone's out there doing a podcast, just so you know, if you don't care about
your voice and your likeness. which you probably don't anyways because it's already all over the
internet, use ChatGPT. Can't we just say make us more attractive and successful? I'm already there.
Yeah, sure, I'm already there. Well, make Sean all of those things when you're running it through
ChatGPT. All right, let's close it. I don't know how we're going to do this.
Julian, you're last. So for teaching Python, this is Sean. And this is Kelly.
And this is Julian. Signing off.